Introduction to Highly Available NFS Server on Scale-Out Storage Systems Based on GlusterFS

Many enterprises still heavily depend on NFS to access their data from different operating systems and applications. NFS-Ganesha is a user-space file server that supports NFSv3, NFSv4, NFSv4.1 as well as pNFS.

GlusterFS has now added NFS-Ganesha server to its NFS stack to eventually replace native Gluster-NFS server which supports only NFSv3. The integration with NFS-Ganesha now means additional protocol support w.r.t. NFSv4, better security and authentication mechanisms for enterprise use. The upcoming release of GlusterFS (3.7) introduces Clustered or multi-head active/active NFS support using Pacemaker and Corosync for better availability. There is also tighter integration with Gluster CLI to manage NFS-Ganesha exports. This presentation is aimed at providing a basic overview of the entire solution and step-by-step configuration.

Learning Objectives

Basic architecture walk-through of nfs-ganesha and what the integration with GlusterFS means.
Architecture overview of the multi-head active/active highly available NFS solution.
Step-by-step guide to configure NFS-Ganesha on GlusterFS using newly introduced CLI options.
Requirements and best practice recommendations for HA configuration for NFSGanesha with GlusterFS.